As the powers that be have stripped away fringe benefits and much of the salaries of the jobs on offer, leaving many of us struggling to just live month to month, a con was perpetrated upon us. Instead of honestly stating what they really think, “What you people need to learn is. . . ,” which is that rich people are superior and all y’all need to get by on what you can get, they stated that the cure for our poverty was . . . wait for it . . . entrepreneurship.
Can’t stand the shitty jobs you are being offered? Become your own boss! Create the job you want for yourself.
Right, you need to be a business owner, not a business employee, just like them!
What they do not tell you is that data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. And, “failure” usually means you lose all of the money, time, and effort invested in that attempt.
According to business owners, reasons for failure include their start-up money running out, being in the wrong market, a lack of research, bad partnerships, ineffective marketing, and not being an expert in the industry. Gosh could any of these apply to you?
This sounds like a soldier being encouraged to go explore a minefield.
But they have stopped giving that message. (When was the last time you heard the term entrepreneur? It used to be ubiquitous.) Now they are promoting “side hustles.” This is an effort, by you, to create your own job, while still working or seeking a traditional job.
The story goes that you work your “side hustle” until you are making so much money from that that you can quit your lame ass job or quit looking for one.
So, what are these “side hustles” being promoted? Here’s a sample:
- One is to start your own accounting business from home! You can earn up to $69 per hour working from home, or so says Intuit QuickBooks, the accounting software brand.
- Another is to become an Uber driver! Now that is a path to financial independence.
- One genius suggests that you find free stuff on Craigslist that you can pick up locally and then sell on Craigslist!
- Earn up to $25 per hour . . . delivering food through Doordash!
- And, of course, selling thrift store finds on eBay.
As you can see this are just other shitty jobs you can do so that your total income is a little less shitty, but your life is way shittier.
Calling this entrepreneurship should be a crime. This is just “get another job you lazy bastard” in modern self-help speak, designed to get you to fall for their scams and keep you distracted from their wage and benefits thefts that put you in that position in the first place. You’ll be too bust scrabbling to join or form a union, for instance.
Requiem for the American Dream—Must See TV
Tags: class warfare, Corporate Greed, corruption, Noam Chomsky, obscene wealth, politics, tax the rich
I watched this documentary last night on Amazon Prime (it is available on YouTube also). It was made in 2015 and I can’t see how I could have missed it. It involves a running commentary, actually taken over several years, by Noam Chomsky and the topic was how we got to where we are now, politically and economically.
Professor Chomsky has an encyclopedic knowledge of current affairs, history, and many other topics so he is able to put things together quite beautifully. (I am a fan, btw.)
If you have followed this blog for a long while you will hear topics I have addressed a fair number of times, the basic issue is not a battle royale between conservatives and liberals, as we have been led to believe, but between those who possess much wealth and the rest of us. This battle has been going on for as long as this country has existed and goes much further back into quite ancient history.
Here are some tastes: Bank regulation developed after the Great Depression and coming out of the New Deal meant there were no bank or market crashes of any note through the 1950’s and 1960’s. Now they have become a feature of our economy (guess why), so much so that business insurers are factoring in the taxpayer bailouts that will unfailingly accompany such a crash in their calculations.
Economists developed their theories based upon “informed consumers making rational choices” yet advertisers are operating to create “uniformed consumers making irrational choices” . . . and we are allowing our politicians to hire advertising and marketing consultants to run our political campaigns.
The masterminds on the side of the wealthy are attacking solidarity every chance they get. They do not want people to feel solidarity behind public schools, for example, they want us to feel it is “every man for himself.” The same is with race relations, women’s rights, etc. They certainly do not want labor unions empowered by solidarity to oppose anything rich businessmen want to do.
And to reinforce that this is not a conservative-liberal battle, Chomsky points out that both conservatives and liberals were adamantly against people of the common sort being involved in politics. Most were in favor of putting us back “in our place” to allow the wealthy to run the country properly. (They, both conservatives and liberals, actually allowed themselves to be quoted for publication saying such things, so you know they were feeling privileged, and probably paid, to do so.)
The most repeated comment was “When you allow the wealthy to become powerful, what did you expect to happen?”)
These are just a few of the many points made in this documentary.
If you are not up to speed as to what is really going on now, this is an excellent way to catch up, as it were. Highly, highly recommended. I will watch it again in a few days to catch what I missed.